Dual booting Windows XP with Windows XP

me, too, though I will try to help,

 

Great tutorial. Thank you

 

Later please, after I do this I will reply. Else, there will be so many anti XP busy bodies, do gooders and Linux promoters responding to my answer, going off topic, disrupting and bloating up this thread. In a very short while this thread will be so bloated looking like Windows 10

 

The "tricky" part just is because of the boot.ini editing process.

I'm not sure exactly which boot.ini you should edit. Probably edit the one for the XP that boots when you turn on your computer.

 

Okay!

 

I want to partition my Hard Drive (500GB), in to 4 primary partitions. Since my 1st partition is 'C' I want assign D,E and F to the other 3 that I am going to make . My DVD and USB drives already have D,E,F,G,H,I assigned to them. I want to change these to G,H,I,J,K,L so that I have D,E,F free for the 3 new partitions. When I try to do this I get the warning "Changing the drive letters of a volume might cause programs to no longer run". Should I ignore this warning, go ahead and change the drive letters?

 

yes and changed the fixed drives first before you do the partitons.

 

Some programs link to (various) drives & locations. In this case, a prog wont find the location its looking for. With what I do, this is a minor annoyance, most of the time! If you use D,E,F,G,H,I, just for storage, changing shouldnt be an issue at all.

-c-

 

It's all done. It was as easy as pie because I did not have to modify the Boot.ini at all. After the installation was complete, the computer re-booted on its own and the menu was displayed showing both OSes and asking me to select the one I want to boot.

Already connected to the Internet and updates coming from Microsoft.

I have to change the drive letters again though. Before I partitioned I changed the USB and DVD drive letters as indicated above to G,H,I,J,K,L. Then I allocated D,E and F to the 3 new partitions. Minitool Partition Wizard accepted those drive letters. Before installing new OS, I checked in Disk management to make doubly sure, and the allocated letters were there to be seen. But when I was installing, when I was asked where to install the new OS I saw that the drive letters were changed. I went ahead with the installation anyway.

My partitions are now lettered C,H,I and J instead of C,D,E and F. USB drives have gone back to their earlier D,E,F and G while DVD drives are changed to K and L-what a mess! I want to change them again By first changing USB and DVD to the last 6 letters of the alphabet and then change the new partitions to read D,E and F. Any thoughts about my doing this?

 

https://collab.its.virginia.edu/wiki/toolbox/Changing Drive Letters In Windows Xp.html

https://lamansky.com/tech/change-drive-letter/

https://www.online-tech-tips.com/co...s-xp-for-an-external-usb-stick-or-hard-drive/

above are some nice tutorials on changing drive letters in xp

 

In your 1st link this statement is there "You should not change drives containing system information or installed programs". Does this mean that I must not change the drive letter of the 2nd partition that has my 2nd XP. The one I installed new?

 

I am not sure, since I have not had 2 of the same os on a harddrive

if you are able to boot to the 2nd os, it would seem to me that windows would have the drive listed as c:, I do know that some programs will not work if the system drive is not c:, You should leave the letter and experiment as to which programs will not work with the drive listed as other than c:, It would have been greatly simpler to have to separate drives with windows, (as per cornemuse) and plug in each when you want it, and then use the rest of the drive partitions as storage, But since you now have all installed, you should just experiment with your programs.

 

When you installed the second copy of XP, it probably automatically configured boot.ini for you.

 

I looked in the Boot.ini file and that's exactly what had hapenned. It was a pleasant surprise Now I only need to get my drive letters changed.

 

'nuther thing with assigning drive letters, I (for a while) started assigning letters starting(!) with 'Z' & going backwards. Very rarely did I have issues. Problem was, I allus would forget 'which was assigned what'!

Assigning like this, the os, when assigning new usb devices, uses just past what is assigned c, d, e, etc, always connected devices. Unless you have 25 devices, no clashes, , , ,

 

Thank you cornemuse. I did this but it is not working. I first wiped the 2nd partition and deleted the new XP. In the old XP I did this trick and it worked fine. The four partitions ended up with C,D,E and F - Just the way I wanted. Then I installed my 2nd XP. During installation the partitions for the new XP were automatically named H,I and J instead of D,E and F. This was at the point where I was asked, to what partition I wanted XP installed. In a dual boot setup I think it is not possible to have the same partition letters for the hard drive. It seems the new XP installer would not allow that.

 

That is so. OS in dual boot can still, in most cases, see the other partitions. (sometimes not, as in Windows can't decipher many Linux's File System) So would not work if in fact the same letter were appearing more than once, as Path names would be ambiguous.

 

I have got my XP dual boot nicely set up. Everything is working smoothly.

The reason is exactly what Computer semi-expert said above. I like it so much that I have 2 copies. Since I intend to always keep XP as my primary OS, I bought my 2nd XP from Amazon when MS stopped support in 2014. Support or not I was not giving up my XP for anything. This year when all updates were stopped I decided to make my own XP ISOs using nLite, so that I don't have to struggle with updates and drivers when I re-install every year or so. So the dual boot setup makes it easier to create the 2 ISOs, without uninstalling either. Another reason to create ISO CDs is, when my hard disk and/or the motherboard packs up, I can buy a new HDD or a new motherboard and simply install my XPs with all drivers and updates, without even breaking sweat. Further if one XP develops a problem, I still have the other one running until I put things right with the first one. This really is a labour of love

I also have 3 other XP ISOs downloaded from the internet and they are also as good. I have installed them and used them from time to time on a laptop

 

It's very easy to do with more than one partition.
I have XP 64 and XP sp3 on one drive and the same on another drive as backups.
XP64 is on the 1st partition. XP sp3 is on 2nd partition on both drives.
Create a third partition to save files on so you can re-install without losing them.
Save your original boot.ini file somewhere if you are worried about it..
If you go to System Properties "Startup and Recovery" you can set the Default operating system.
Windows will modify the boot.ini for you when you install the second XP. The boot.ini will only be on the partition that you installed XP on first.

 

Here is what my Boot ini file looks like now:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional 2" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional 1"=optin /fastdetect

XP Professional 2 is what I installed later. Why is the difference shown in bold type? Shoud I edit XP Professional 1 also to read /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn